New (Old) Hobby

For those who have known me (Ross) for a long time, you may remember that I used to be quite involved with the hobby of astronomy. Now that we're going to be spending a lot of time in Arizona, some of the best weather for astronomy, I decided to buy a telescope and get back into the hobby. I bought a Celestron NexStar 5 SE, a 5" telescope (click here to see a picture). It's small enough to be very portable but the optics are better than the 8" telescope I used to have at about half the cost. And it's fully computerized. In the old days we used to have to find things in the sky by finding bright objects and then "hopping" to the (usually) dim objects we wanted to see. It was slow, sometimes frustrating and often unsuccessful. Now you just tell the control pad what you want to see and the telescope automatically moves to it! I can now see in an hour what used to take all night to see! I'm really quite impressed with how far things have advanced.

I also recently bought a Meade DSI (deep sky imager), basically a digital camera for the telescope. For the technically interested it's a CCD camera. 20 years ago CCD cameras had just come out. If you wanted one it would cost at least $10,000! This camera was a tiny fraction of that and performs circles around the old ones. The software compensates for may of the tracking and exposure errors. Here's a couple of the pictures I've taken after just a few minutes of experimenting. As I learn how to use the camera better the pictures should get better too.

	A section of the moon.
	Saturn.
	Polaris, the North Star, is actually a "binary" or double star. Here you can see the bright primary star and, to its immediate left, the dimmer bluish secondary star. Click on the picture to see the 2 stars more clearly.